For the past several years, the conventional wisdom has been that the United States and Europe have grown apart, that the end of the cold war and 9/11 have produced a strategic divergence that is impossible to overcome.

Type the words 'Europe' and 'crisis' into the internet search engine Google, and more than four million entries come up. The media use these two words so frequently that they have become interchangeable.

Dear Mr President, You have defeated an opponent who made a point of saying that he would pay more attention to European allies than you have done. You and your supporters must feel that your 'Americafirst' philosophy has been vindicated.

The burning of Bush The US president was once known for his ability to unite factions but, with his foreign policy in tatters around him, he is dubbed the Great Polariser. What went wrong for George W. Bush and his advisers?

The US and Europe have to succeed in an exceptionally difficult undertaking. They have to meet not just a single or double challenge, but a triple one: They need to prove, to each other and the rest of the world, that the principal rationale of the US-European partnership is indeed no longer the bilateral relationship and the broader European agenda, but their ability to tackle, together, the growing problems of a troubled world.

Not all is doom and gloom in the tattered transatlantic relationship. EU member-states and the US are co-operating effectively over terrorism. But the US needs to work more with the EU as a whole, rather thansimply through individual European governments.